DESCRIPTION
- Don't blindly trust freelancers
- Control the other party's tasks through work splitting while managing risk with contracts
- If you cannot do that, bring in a second opinion
Main Text
The title is provocative, but I have had several similar consultations in quick succession lately, so I am summarizing them here. In short:
- A third request to extend the delivery deadline (with tears). Can they actually finish this?
- The freelancer I hired for a full system build went silent
- The system delivered by a freelancer did not meet the expected level and was unusable
These kept happening at year-end. When I asked friends, they were hearing similar stories too. The incidents differ, but the root cause is the same, and I feel strongly that this is the client's responsibility—not the contractor's. It is a structural problem.
Why This Happens
You need to understand the premise that freelancers have no organizational form.
Even for a one-person company: no matter how trustworthy a freelancer is, if they are seriously injured in a traffic accident, they cannot finish a product due at month-end. Same with illness. Worse, during unconsciousness or confusion they cannot be reached at all. It is very important to keep in mind that you are hiring someone who can disappear like that.
What Organizations Take for Granted
When the other party belongs to an organization, risk is spread inside it—"contact person A is unreachable, so B takes over." The client's organization has redundancy. When workload grows, some places scale out (subcontract). Less person-dependent organizations keep running when the president falls— the vice president steps in; when a manager falls, work still moves to some degree. That is what an organization is. (I am not touching on internal fires or failure stories here.)
Organizations also split work into smaller grains. The clearest split is sales, back office, and the developer team tied to delivery. Inside the developer team, design, coding, and programming are subdivided and often run in parallel. The company bills the client not only for development but also for this splitting, progress management, back-office costs, and so on.
In other words, the order cost includes risk-spreading fees and progress-management fees that are not direct development.
Considering the Freelancer Case
Not everyone is like this, but I rarely hear of freelancers who spread risk thoroughly. I believe most at least do the following:
- Forming subcontractors for when they cannot work, and writing documentation
- Source control and shared progress management so the client can recover the current state if they are unconscious
To spread risk seriously, you would form alliances, share a mailbox, always CC information, build a habit of splitting work you could do alone and ordering from each other at a cost of constant risk spreading, and so on.
But this is not the freelancer's problem. Given that a freelancer is originally a "mercenary," I think it is natural not to do this. A mercenary controls risk with their own income and life; is that not something the client should control?
Even without a formal employment contract, it is safer for the client to treat a freelancer as a mercenary they brought in themselves. There is hardly a freelancer who is sharp with every weapon and excellent at everything; the client controls those risks and lets the freelancer focus on the battle in front of them—that is efficient. Freelancers are something to manage; if you will not (or cannot) do that, quietly outsource to a company with an organization.
Two things work for management:
Bind with contracts
Obvious, but exchange contracts. Paying upfront on a verbal promise is out of the question—keep that to close friends you trust (I still do not recommend it). Recently I saw a contract that lacked essentials and thought "uh... okay..." At minimum include:
- What counts as contract fulfillment
- Conditions for termination (e.g. no contact for one month)
- Damages for termination or breach
Do not just sign a contract the freelancer brings because "that's how it is." Both sides should nail down the terms. Freelancers have no boss; you are the only one who can check delivery quality.
Spread risk by splitting work
Not every freelancer can build an app alone. Many people do not know what they can and cannot do and say "I'll try it."
If it turns out easy, bonus 500,000 yen! I'll ask on a Q&A site like teratail for now!!
Assume people like that exist and decide how much work to give a freelancer. Smaller grains raise your management cost but often lower what you pay the freelancer—you are taking over management they would do.
When trouble hits, you only need to re-order that part of the work.
For a website-sized grain, you do not need to split finely every time, but for app development or marketing packages over 2–3 million yen, splitting real work helps. In an organization there are managers focused on management and progress; people below focus on building. Not every freelancer is a Superman who can finish alone what that structure delivers.
And this goes with contracts. If they say they can finish, make penalties and the order amount larger. If they cannot finish, the client—not anyone else—takes damage from the project failing or client relationships souring, so control risk firmly.
Banning subcontracting is out of the question. Nothing is scarier than one person having to finish everything, so let them subcontract freely. What matters is high-quality delivery. (Still, state clearly that your direct counterpart is responsible for subcontract quality—otherwise blame gets passed around.)
Summary: Handing Everything Off Is High Cost. If You Cannot Manage, Bring in a Second Opinion
I will say it again: not every freelancer is a Superman who can do everything an organization does alone. Some exist, but you are the one who decides whether the person in front of you is one.
If they are not Superman, controlling their tasks through work splitting and risk through contracts is vital. If you cannot judge that—or it is too hard—bring in a second opinion so you control your own risk. Put a third party between client and contractor.
Handing everything off is high cost, again. Even without malice, if they have an accident tomorrow and you cannot reach them for a week, is your request protected so it causes no damage?
See you again.